The Tyranny of Dead Internet Ideas; Intro

These comments are being posted simultaneously on The Drift and on the iMedia Connection blog in advance of my keynote at next month’s iMedia Agency Summit in Austin, Texas. This is the first of three posts on this topic.

I see dead ideas. And they don’t even know they’re dead.

I’m liberally borrowing the premise of Matt Miller’s economic treatise “The Tyranny of Dead Ideas” and applying it to digital marketing and advertising. Miller’s position is that societies, economies and industries have a difficult time recognizing the long-held, often sacred, ideas and premises that – if left unchallenged – actually stifle innovation and promote intellectual stagnation and inertia.

And does our industry ever have a closetful!

Having been part of the literal inception of online advertising in 1994 (my team at Wired/Hotwired in New York sold many of the web’s very first banners) I can say without hesitation that it was a really different business back then. Yet the models and principles would look shockingly familiar to those we held during Clinton’s first term. If we were starting the industry from scratch today – a time of screaming broadband, social media and always-on connectivity – many of these concepts would never have been embraced in the first place. So grab your shotgun and let’s take out a few zombies, shall we?

Dead Idea #1: Banner as Transportation Vehicle. Not even an anachronism any more. Moving people around the web is just plain stupid. Today’s bandwidth and creative technology make it pretty simple to advertise to people where they are instead of trying to move them where we wish they were.It’s called an impression, not a transfer.

Dead Idea #2: Optimizing Click Rates. A .25% click rate — the average – means that 975 of every thousand online ads have no value. Yet we’ve made a cottage industry of nudging this up to .3%. Hello?? Folks, this is a dead idea. We can aspire to more than simply sucking less.

Think I’m dead wrong? Have a few dead ideas of your own to contribute. Post them here and then watch this space tomorrow for more of the walking dead.

4 comments

How about a new idea that should already be dead. Re-targeting. In practice, folks are saying let’s not focus on messaging to people while they are shopping for the very product we sell. Let’s wait until they go elsewhere and then beg them to come back! Brilliant. We just might get to that top shelf suck of .3%.

(With respect to my colleges who do it right, and use re-targeting as a frequency tool vs. a cheaper alternative to paying for in-market or ‘in-moment’ advertising.)

i couldn’t agree more DW that these are indeed dead ideas (the king is dead, long live the king), but they are far more than that. they are products of an equally “dead” way of engaging clients whereby no clear role for the digital channels is defined at the outset, old and meaningless metrics are ascribed without question and creative (the experience itself) is an afterthought…
i’ve proposed (early and often) that CT as a ‘thing’ (dead idea #2)has zero value to an advertiser and is NOTHING but a waste of time. i’ve looked extensively at campaign data that illustrates clearly when you make decisions based on the click, you have an equal chance of decreasing or increasing actual performance. i have been, in fact, wrong in one aspect of this… for some verticals/objectives, CT actually negatively correlates to real success (but never, reliably positively). nice, huh?
looking fwd to seeing where you take this…keeping solutions to myself for the moment 🙂

Possible dead idea #3: many industries (such as automotive) only sell their products through retail stores (not websites), yet advertisers in these industries are obsessed with measuring and optimizing traffic to their websites. We need to restart with the most important objectives (driving sales and retail traffic), identify the best metrics to determine whether or not our marketing efforts are moving the needle.